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Hollywood in all-out assault
on America's 'war on terror'
Andrew Gumbel
London
Independent
Sunday October 14, 2007
A generation ago, Hollywood movies doubting
the goodwill and sincerity of the American government were invariably
shot through with a sense of paranoia – nervy, unsettling
films such as The Conversation, or All the President's Men.
Now, though, with the Iraq war dragging on, the bad faith of
the US government seems to be almost a given in the movie business.
A slew of new features, looking either at Iraq or the "war
on terror", or both, is about to hit the screens, and almost
all dwell on the dark side of the American experience.
This week sees the release of Rendition, about an Egyptian-American
mistaken for a terrorist and shipped off to north Africa to be
tortured under US supervision. Later in the autumn comes Redacted,
a shocking, cinéma-vérité style look at the
true nature of combat in Iraq from Brian De Palma.
Already out in the United States are In the Valley of Elah, the
story of a soldier killed by his unit so he wouldn't spill the
beans on atrocities they committed in Iraq, and The Kingdom, a
Jamie Foxx action vehicle that uses an attack on a US army base
in Saudi Arabia as its backdrop.
(Article continues below)
Also coming are Lions for Lambs, directed by Robert Redford,
about two friends who go to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, Grace
Is Gone, in which John Cusack plays the husband of a soldier killed
in Iraq, and Stop Loss, in which Ryan Phillippe is a soldier who
defies an order to return to combat.
Not so long ago, Hollywood was famously shy of taking stories
ripped from the headlines. In the early 1970s, a film-maker wanting
to address the war in Vietnam had to do so obliquely – as
Robert Altman did in M*A*S*H, set in Korea.
Now, newspaper and magazine articles are getting optioned all
the time – In the Valley of Elah, for example, is based
on a feature in Playboy – and studios have a thirst to be
seen to be relevant. Whether that works is another matter. Rendition,
which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon, has had a mixed
reception. Variety magazine complained that it "drains the
life out of an obviously explosive subject".
A Mighty Heart, about the murder of The Wall Street Journal's
Daniel Pearl, became a star vehicle for Angelina Jolie, who played
his widow, Mariane. Asra Nomani, a colleague of Pearl's, complained
that the film reduced the couple to ciphers, proving how difficult
Hollywood finds it to rise above the superficial.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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